I recommend waiting until April for AP3.0. Even though Tesla says buying FSD will get you a free AP3.0 retrofit, I have a suspicion that this refers only to a computer swap but nothing else. In a conference call, Elon was talking about how easy it is to swap the computer and that it's just plug & play. My guess is, AP3.0 will have additional wiring for redundancy that AP2.5 doesn't have and it won't be possible to add those. The timing of these price changes could be a move by Tesla to clear out the existing inventory of parts so they can switch production to AP3.0 hardware soon. Also, Tesla has thousands of Model 3s in inventory they need to sell before announcing AP3.0.
Normally, big changes like AP3.0 are supposed to happen in the first month of the quarter and after the end-of-quarter rush is over. I think you should at least wait until April because I think there is 60% chance AP3.0 hardware will be added to cars starting in early April. Tesla prefers to deliver cars within the same quarter they were produced in because it makes the financials look good. Therefore they will try to deliver all cars in Q2 that were produced in Q2. That means, starting on April 1st production needs to switch from US to international orders because some destinations take 45 days to deliver.
This way, cars produced between 1-10 April can be delivered by the end of June in Hong-Kong, China, UK etc. Imagine Tesla announcing AP3.0 hardware in Q2 but cars that were produced between 1-10 April for Hong-Kong, China, UK etc don't have the AP3.0 hardware and they are still not delivered even though Tesla has revealed the hardware. What would happen? Simple, 90% of those international buyers who have not taken delivery yet would refuse delivery instead of taking delivery of hardware that was already discontinued.
Apparently, in places like Hong-Kong it is extremely important to have the latest and greatest version of products, therefore the refused delivery rate in Hong-Kong could be 100% instead of 90%. This actually happened once when Tesla released a new Model S version when Hong-Kong deliveries were not complete yet.
Therefore when they start production on April 1st for international orders that are furthest away, those cars must have AP3.0 hardware. That's why I suggest waiting until April. However, there is 35% chance AP3.0 hardware will go into production in early July. April is just a guess but it is likely to be the first month of the quarter. The following 3 events happened in the first month of the quarter.
- AWD and Autopilot 1.0 was revealed on 9 Oct 2014 (the D event)
- The Model S facelift happened on 12 April 2016
- Autopilot 2.0 was released on 16 Oct 2016.
